Chris Kelly: Will my hon. Friend encourage people who wish to find out more to visit the European Scrutiny Committee’s website at parliament.uk/ESCOM?

Jacob Rees-Mogg: I am afraid to say that I disagree with my hon. and almost learned Friend. Law is the foundation of what politicians do, and politicians use their political will through the law. Indeed, they have the ability through Parliament to change the law, but they cannot just ignore it.
	That is why I want to come on to Sir Jon Cunliffe’s important letter. He makes two significant points. First, he notes that
	“the EU institutions must only be used outside the EU Treaties with the consent of all Member States, and must respect the EU Treaties.”
	In response to a question at a meeting of the European Scrutiny Committee last week from my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), the Minister for Europe—who, if I may say so, was extremely helpful at the evidence session—said when asked whether permission had been given by the Government for the EU treaties to be used:
	“No, we have not been asked so to do.”
	It ought to be of grave concern to the House and to the country that the member states of the European Union, excluding us, Sweden and the Czech Republic, have decided to proceed with a treaty without establishing that they are following the correct legal forms.

Richard Fuller: I was prompted to call this debate to discuss the safety of private hire and taxi drivers and their passengers as a result of recent events in my constituency—the death of a constituent who was a private hire driver and an assault on another driver. More broadly, I want to encourage the Minister to make it his priority to transform the perception, and too often the reality, that private hire and taxi drivers are given second-class status in our public transport system when it comes to their safety. I also wish to highlight to the Minister some of the impediments to the safety of passengers that have been highlighted to me by Am I Safe?, a developer of applications to help passengers to verify at the point of hire that a vehicle is legitimately licensed. Those impediments arise from the complex regulatory structures, differing rules, and inconsistent interpretation of access to information rights that arise from the various licensing authorities.
	Private hire and taxi drivers are a vital part of our public transport system, and when it comes to their physical safety and the safety of their property, they deserve to be afforded the same protection as our bus drivers, airline staff and railway employees, but they are not. In many towns such as Bedford, if a person has been out for the evening with their friends, private hire vehicles and taxis are often the only answer to the question, “Who will take me home tonight?”, yet drivers routinely have to deal with people who can be abusive, and may be under the influence of alcohol, drugs or both. A journey may end with someone vomiting in the vehicle or running off without paying. Private hire and taxi drivers run those risks—not routinely, of course, but much more frequently than many of the public would appreciate.
	Let me turn to recent incidents in Bedford. As Adam Thompson of the Bedfordshire on Sunday newspaper reported,
	“Fayaz Alhaq…who runs AGS Cars in St Peter’s Street, Bedford, says his employees are ‘running a gauntlet’ every weekend and have a job ‘as dangerous as the police’. His words come after 61-year-old grandfather Mehar Dhariwal of…Kempston…died…having been assaulted the week before while working.”
	Mr Thompson’s report went on:
	“Only last month Bedfordshire on Sunday reported how 24/7 private hire driver Turbez Ahmed…was attacked…by a gang of eight who wouldn’t pay their fare up front.”
	Efforts by Bedfordshire police to bring to justice the assailants in those two horrific and sad cases go on. I do not want to obscure those efforts by talking further about those instances, but although they are specific cases, sadly they are not isolated examples.
	A freedom of information request to Bedfordshire police showed that there had been 93 assaults in the preceding 12 months on private hire and taxi drivers, including 35 cases of aggravated bodily harm and 30 common assaults. My local authority estimates that
	that amounts to 2% of drivers being assaulted each year. Very few jobs have such a high rate of unprovoked violence.
	I have spoken with the National Private Hire Association, the Licensed Private Hire Care Association, and Private Hire News, and I am indebted to them for their engagement and assistance with my preparation for the debate. They all, without exception, talked openly and depressingly about the widespread nature of violence towards drivers, and said, even more worryingly, that the level of violence continues to increase.
	The National Private Hire Association sent me news reports of attacks on drivers with knives; guns, fake and real; baseball bats; a hammer; a fire extinguisher; and even a wheelie bin. Drivers have been set on fire and run over by their own vehicles. I have not found any nationally collated statistics on assaults and murders of private hire and hackney carriage drivers. Perhaps the Minister can tell me whether those statistics are collated. If not, that in itself indicates that the issue of safety is not receiving the attention that it should. The GMB union kept a record of attacks between April 2007 and February 2008; it listed that nine drivers were killed and 45 suffered serious physical assaults while doing their job. The Department for Transport conducted research on personal security issues in 2008 and found that, on average, three drivers a year are unlawfully killed—evidence from across the country that our private hire and taxi drivers are at risk. I would argue that we have not made sufficient progress in mitigating those risks.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) raised the issue in a debate on 24 June 2009. That debate was interesting because of a number of points that he raised, but also because he noted the extent of the private hire and taxi sector. He said that
	“we are talking about an industry that employs 340,000 people…The industry makes about 700 million taxi journeys a year, which means an average of roughly 11 journeys for each member of the population. About £3 billion is spent on fares each year. We are therefore talking about a sizeable industry that plays a major role in our public transportation.”—[Official Report, 24 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 912.]
	The Minister responding that day, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), was alert to the issue of driver safety and made some useful suggestions, but underlying that debate and much of the industry commentary is a sort of shrug-of-the-shoulders view that the issue is just too tough to tackle, and in some sense that it is the cost of doing business. What strikes me is not the fair and sometimes compelling explanations of the complexities of implementing changes that will tackle these widespread instances of assault, but that given these horrific attacks at such high incidence rates for so many years in a single sector of the economy, we have allowed the complexities to thwart our action for so long.
	In the search for remedies, I turn first to the perception of the industry. Department for Transport research in 2008 found that
	“a strong belief held by many drivers, controllers and others representing the trade is that the root cause of many of the problems is a lack of respect from the public for taxi and private hire drivers.”
	That lack of respect can make the transition to abuse or to violence a much easier step to take. It is a sad fact also that this lack of respect too often descends into racial abuse.
	I understand that a similar issue confronted the door security sector—I am not sure whether we can call them bouncers these days. The violence against bouncers was seen as part of that job, but a focused effort on changing that perception, together with other initiatives, has had a positive impact, reducing the incidence of attacks on door security staff at our pubs and clubs. What, in practical terms, has the Department for Transport done since 2008 to tackle the public perception of the industry, and what steps would the Minister consider undertaking? Perhaps it would be appropriate for the Transport Committee to assist in this effort.
	Also in 2008 under the previous Government, the Sentencing Guidelines Council included taxi and private hire drivers in that category of workers where longer sentences would result from a crime. What assessment has the Department made of the impact of those changes in sentencing guidelines? Does the Minister believe that further action to strengthen the guidelines is warranted?
	The national associations and the GMB raised with me the issue of the introduction of CCTV and/or driver shields. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on those, as I understand that there are differing opinions about the desirability of each of those options, but he will be aware of the initiatives by some local authorities to investigate or roll out CCTV solutions. They have been considered for Brighton, Braintree, Oxford, Manchester and other locations. He will be equally aware of the very high cost of some of these solutions. It is unfair to expect drivers to bear the full cost of the equipment, particularly if the market price continues to be hundreds of pounds.